The clueless journalists that want to write about something 'edgy' and 'VR' discover that Second Life is a lame excuse for a massively-multiplayer online experience (pretty much used only by the clueless), and stop referring to it as if it's the be-all and end-all archetypical "VR" experience?
Because to simulate the "vision obscuration, false instrument readings, dust coating and contamination, loss of traction, clogging of mechanisms, abrasion, thermal control problems, seal failures, and inhalation and irritation" it certainly sounds like they could use asbestos dust and have something quite close.
Of course, then OSHA might step in and say "hey, working with that stuff's too dangerous - you can't do that" which is precisely the POINT.
So, we've been told for years that every so often it's a "new NASA". Can they step aside from their overarching obsession with safety at all costs to actually get some serious work done despite the risk?
Even though this is an interesting story,/. needs to stop linking to this attention whore's blog and link directly to the information, not someone writing about the information that wants more clicks on his site.
I'm not going to disagree with your conclusion, but it's interesting that in your entire list, there's absolutely nothing there that's convincing in any real way.
"1. Vista runs extremely well on any modern PC. You may need a video card to get a composite desktop, but I bet people who don't know enough to get a real video card won't care anyway." Well, that depends on how you define 'modern', doesn't it? I mean, most people would consider PCs bought within the last couple of years 'modern', yet a recent (Infoweek?) survey showed that something like 60-80% of business computers would have to be upgraded or replaced to run Vista. I'm not even CONSIDERING eye-candy like the composite desktop - I'm talking the OS+services running typical tasks. And this also doesn't consider the whole realm of business and home software that would require upgrades to run on Vista due to its abandonment of Win95/98 routine support.
"2. Vista may not be revolutionary, but it's a clear improvement over XP. It's better looking, more polished and overall a much nicer experience." Really, how? I haven't met a person yet that can tell me of a single thing it does that XP doesn't already do - that is, aside from implement an overwhelmingly restrictive DRM regime.
"3. Almost nobody is going to "buy" Vista. Very few people "bought" XP either. It just makes more sense to get it preloaded." I get it, because MS's restrictive licenses to OEMs mean that users don't get the choice....ergo it's better? Huh?
"4. The drivers and other compatibility issues will be ironed out quickly." R-i-g-h-t. Because XP doesn't have any patches anymore. All those issues were ironed out quickly, too.
No, the question is: why has it taken so long for the planet to start to warm again to what are the more reasonable mean temperatures it's had for most of its history (if it is indeed doing so)?
Of course the easy answer is that they don't care as much about safety, which is balderdash. You think Russians don't care as much about their lives as anyone else? Obviously, they do.
No, I think anyone with familiarity with the space programs of both the "west" and the Soviets...er....Russians would say that reliability is one of their strong points - once the technology has been established. For various reasons, the 'western' space agencies are always improving and tinkering, while the Russian space programs seem to find something that works, and stick with that. They might end up with a control panel with a bunch of Dr Strangelove switches and levers like in the 1950s instead of a cool new multifunction display, but those switches WORK and are CHEAP.
So why try to develop the multifunction display in the first place? A lot of not-directly-measurable benefits as far as safety, pilot-task saturation, etc but the switches DO work just as well.
I was an early adopter of the DVD, and I'm pleased with my choice. However, what I saw is that post-cutting-edge DVD players were just as good for an order of magnitude cheaper and that this post-edge phase was no more than a couple of years later.
Most importantly, I saw that no-name makers made decent quality DVD players for ultra-cheap, and that they recognized the commercial value of user-friendliness. I'm specifically talking about Apex, who makes players with fantastically-easy-to-break region coding. For that reason, and once I heard from a couple of reputable friends that their quality was good, I've been recommending them all over the place.
Now I'll wait for Apex to make HD players because: - they'll be inexpensive - the HD format thing will be resolved by then, presumeably - they'll probably have some sort of hardware that's either implemented or implementable that defeats HD DRM systems as currently designed.
For that, I'm willing to wait a couple of years for marginally better picture quality.
I think the point is to provide a fair pre-purchase metric that people can believe. I know my Volkswagen was advertised as having probably 10-20% better mileage than I get in routine driving. I applaud the EPA for making these numbers mean something in the real-world.
Most importantly, "For the first time, the EPA also will require estimated mileage to be posted on medium-duty pickup trucks, vans and sport utility vehicles -- behemoths such as the Ford Excursion that weigh between 8,500 and 10,000 pounds." is going to be huge. Take that, Detroit, you geriatric has-been. That's a place in desperate need of Darwin.
I've never read "Getting things done" but I can confirm that this system is truly anxiety reducing.
I found out as soon as I started using a palm pilot consistently (and it has to become a habit) that my stress levels decreased tremendously. I think this is the 'addiction' of some of these sorts of devices (including non-devices, like the Franklin Planner system) - to know that you've put it in there, dated it, and WILL get to it is a huge relief.
Of course, then one must be a bit of a slave to oneself: when the item comes up, it has to be dealt with immediately.
Let's remember: 1) what was always scheduled to be a 'couple of hours' very often (perhaps 2/3 of the time) turned into 8-10 hours immediately or shortly after the new patch was applied, servers were up, and then they had to fix something that was newly broken.
2) Most users pay $12-$15/month for 24/7 access. Take down the servers 4 times a month for 4 hours each = 16 hours. That means I'm losing 2% of my available play time. If I'm in Oceania, I'm losing that time during my prime time hours. NOTE: Blizz has been pretty good about compensating people with time credits when the downtime is ridiculous, like DAYS.
Not that it's a big deal (I personally have PLENTY of things that need doing elsewise) but it's not utterly insignificant, either.
I think you're missing the point. Yes, this is an ALPHA model of the device, as the website clearly states.
The key technologies here are a) the printers are capable of processing subsequent jobs while still producing a current job b) all machine settings flow from a data file associated with a particular book format c) your raw inputs are paper, ink/toner, and cover stock (and data). That's it.
How much is one of those IBIS machines? You'd need at least the SB3-4 to do the job, and in that case you have to feed it with - printed covers - printed pages of the right format - changed settings for every book.
Yes, there is too much paper handling, twisting, turning, flipping, etc. Clearly an alpha model that's a proof-of-concept more than a saleable unit. I don't see how they would avoid the milling process, unless they stock (for example) 2 papersources in the machine; otherwise, if they only use a single size sheet (of less than A4) how would they cope with full page illustrations? I guess optimal would be 3 paper sizes - medium quarto, medium octavo, and some average 'paperback' size. But you're probably still going to have a lot of milling, waste, noise, and dust.
Obviously they'd like to see preorders roll in (or even interest) from potential customers before going further. I'm guessing this development has already cost them quite a bit and they're not sure if there's a market.
I think that the main limitation of this is that the books it produces are going to be throwaways - about the quality of a cheap mass-market paperback. Might be good for one full reading or less, before the pages start falling out. The IBIS machines, on the other hand, clearly make superior stitched books, with multiple signatures bound to form the book.
That's probably their market-question: will people pay a reasonable, profit making price for a public-domain book that's of inferior construction, when you can get quite nice volumes of just about everything from companies like Penguin already?
I think the only difference between the results they are getting for in-game ads and the results they get for real-life ads is the fact that in game, since we're dealing with a digital avatar the results can be actually MEASURED.
I think most people generally tune out most ads. Their impact is actually zero. It's occasionally possible that IF I'm thinking of buying something and IF the ad is catchy and IF I happen to notice a particularly clever presentation or jingle, it may briefly impinge on my consciousness.
But if someone at a company measured the amount of additional PROFIT gained from the airing of a single multi-million dollar 30 second spot during the superbowl, or even for a multi-hundreds-of-thousands ad campaign in say Time or Newsweek - I seriously doubt that the costs of advertising are justifiable. Do sales perhaps uptick when an ad is on? Sure. But are there really people out there who see a Budweiser beer ad who then decide to go buy a Budweiser because of that ad (importantly: who weren't going to buy a Bud ANYWAY)?? Enough to justify (in terms of actual profit, not sales) the cost of producing and publishing the ad? I sincerely doubt it.
But eliminate the sham value of advertising and a whole host of revenue structures crumble. Professional sports, for example. Hollywood would tremble as well: Volkswagen is planning to spend $200 million in the next 3-5 yrs to place its cars in Universal movies and in TV shows and ads on NBC, Bravo, Sci Fi and USA. According to Yahoo answers, GM makes nothing on a $20k car. So let's assume that Volkswagen is making at least $6k per car. Are those product placement ads going to sell 33,000 MORE cars than they would have sold without the ads? Seriously?
So now, with in-game ads able to measure very nearly perfectly the presentation, eyeball time, attention-grabbability of every nuance of their performance, advertisers are finding it might not be worth it? What a shock.
Of course, there's no accurate way to determine this in real life - something the ad industry is delighted about.
"public radio only gets a small portion of its funding from tax payer money"
A not-insignificant part of their 'spendable money' comes from the fact that they are not taxed.
Granted, they may not get as much (anymore) directly from the feeding trough of Congress in the form of handouts, but when all of their competition is taxed at the corporate rate of approximately 40% this is a tremendous fiscal advantage and is, in fact, a subsidy - in essence a double whammy since they get all this extra money to spend, and the government has to raise everyone ELSE's taxes a teeny bit to make up for this lost revenue. Corporate Welfare is welfare, no matter how it's handed out.
1) the distance between stereo receptors is significant in an inverse relationship to the sensitivity of an individual receptor. Our eyes can only use parallax to determine depth perception because of the (relative) imprecision of our visual field. If our brain could resolve fine details in the visual field better, that 3" between the eyes would be enough distance to resolve parallax out to 50 yards, for example.
2) further, the comparison eyes/nostrils isn't quite accurate. Eyes can tell direction, while the sense of smell of a single nostril is (AFAIK) purely scalar. If two sensors are scalar, then it's possible that having them closely together would help to detect fainter stimuli, at a cost of some ability to resolve direction. Since the nose (and I'm thinking about a tracking dog here) can be relatively easily waved about to define the strength(s) of a smell-field, maybe the advantages in detection capability are worth the tradeoff, or were at one time.
First, long term habitats (I'm not even going to discuss the stupidly-low-orbit ISS) have to be at a Lagrangian point. L5 is typically mentioned. (nice map at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lagrange_points .jpg) To build at these points is MORE energy because you don't have the (minimal) gravity assist of the moon "downhill" leg.
Further, both have to be built of SOMETHING. Either you lift it out of earth's gravity well and built it at an L-point (or lift it from the moon). Or you can plant a minimal structure on the moon and either use lunar materials (for free) or burrow into the surface. For a space station, every cubic cm of anything has to be lifted from somewhere. For a lunar base, if you need to expand (we all hope) you just dig further or use more moonstuff.
Arguably, a lunar base is safer for the inhabitants. The best protection against cosmic rays and meteorites (barring an atmosphere) is mass. Lots of feet of lunar dirt over ones' head is a hella better protective barrier than some inches of aluminium or kevlar-fabric. The only negative here is that the moon's gravity WOULD attract more micrometeors than a free-floating structure with insignificant (on the scale of planets) mass. Yes, a station is gravitationally neutral so it's conceivable that a 'lifeboat' pod could essentially coast from L5 or L4 to earth entirely unpowered. That's a reasonably heartening idea for anyone wanting a final "all systems have failed, how do we get home" fallback. A lunar base's 'send me home pronto' system would be much more complex with more points of failure. But the "unpowered" route to earth is only reassuring until you start to figure out what happens when you arrive at earth. Screaming into a deep gravity well in an unpowered system is asymtotically identical to 'certain death' anyway.
For humans specifically, a lunar base is probably better as well. 1/6 earth gravity is far easier psychologically and physiologically than weightlessness. We don't, as far as I know, have a good understanding of the long-term effects of the coriolis effects of a spinning station on human equilibrium. Basic human assumptions about how things work around us (convection, etc.) would operate at least somewhat normally on the moon, if somewhat slower.
No, I see no cost savings at all for a station, and when you weigh all the other factors a station makes little sense compared to a base.
Personally, I see the base as a precoursor to the station, where you'd build your interplanetary craft. But that's just me.
....like that "600 megabytes of Games!" CD you bought for $5 from the bargain bin, and found out it wasn't worth THAT.
I skimmed through at least a dozen of the 'articles' to find several of them were streaming video links, a couple were little more than links to other pages, and the ones that were actually written were either meaninglessly fluffy "I'm a WoW addict, and I play a lot! In fact, it's caused me to question my priorities!" (gee, THAT's news) or sophomoric rationalizations "Everyone cheats at video games, it's not a bad thing".
Each with it's page with what, at least FIFTY adlogos or paid links?
Go away, Forbes. I want my 6 minutes back. And the revenue you made from my clicks.
No, what I'm pointing out is that the UCS tries to paint itself as simply that, a "union" of "concerned" scientists, when in fact they've had a Liberal Agenda since their very founding (in opposition to Ronald Reagan, and his Star Wars SDI proposals).
For them now, nearly 30 years later, to still be claiming any sort of objectivity is laughable. That's like saying WAMM (a group founded around the same time, with much of the same agenda) is objective - ludicrous from the start.
No, but then again they at least have the intellectual integrity to say that they are CONSERVATIVE.... unlike a certain disingenuous Union which doesn't identify itself as a Left Wing activist organisation.
Personally, I don't think so. Look at the success of Icewind Dale or Baldur's Gate for how well done and engrossing a 2d game can be.
HOWEVER...I think that you have to separate the tech from the game.
The constant drive to improve render speeds, add polygons, always pushing for ever-faster, ever more expensive hardware? That's little more than phallus-comparison-by proxy, since current 3d games are plenty realistic enough to convey just about any experience visually. Would games get MORE realistic with dynamic shadows, glare, and higher poly counts? Sure. But do they NEED to? Probably not.
It should be noted though, that with the new tools coming out making it ever easier to work in 3d, it's in many cases EASIER to build a world for acting in 3d than 2d - we're monkeys, after all, we THINK in 3d. So to take a game like Planescape, for example, I believe it was rather convoluted to make sure that the character could path to each NPC, reach every clickable on-screen item, etc, etc. "Ah, the character can't walk back there, because then we can't see him."
In a 3d world, that's intuitive and there are (optimally) no 'blind spots'.
"Well, as scientists scan the skies for the easiest piece of mass to colonize, things that resemble Earth's geology & atmosphere are going to require the least effort & resources."
That's a rather meaningless (or outright WRONG) statement.
Mars: tectonically dead or nearly so. Dust storms but no real analogue to Earthly seas, precipitation, or geological processes. Ability to colonize? Relatively easy.
Titan: mountains, clouds, precipitation, "seas", etc. Ability to colonize? Extremely difficult.
Similarity to Earthly processes is meaningless. There are plenty of Earthly processes that make things HARDER, not easier.
Slashdot Mirror
Does TF2 get more points because this is, what, it's 10th year on the "OMG this is going to r0xxorz next year!" list?
The clueless journalists that want to write about something 'edgy' and 'VR' discover that Second Life is a lame excuse for a massively-multiplayer online experience (pretty much used only by the clueless), and stop referring to it as if it's the be-all and end-all archetypical "VR" experience?
Nah, I doubt it too.
OK NASA, how authentic do you want to be?
Because to simulate the "vision obscuration, false instrument readings, dust coating and contamination, loss of traction, clogging of mechanisms, abrasion, thermal control problems, seal failures, and inhalation and irritation" it certainly sounds like they could use asbestos dust and have something quite close.
Of course, then OSHA might step in and say "hey, working with that stuff's too dangerous - you can't do that" which is precisely the POINT.
So, we've been told for years that every so often it's a "new NASA". Can they step aside from their overarching obsession with safety at all costs to actually get some serious work done despite the risk?
AGREED.
/. needs to stop linking to this attention whore's blog and link directly to the information, not someone writing about the information that wants more clicks on his site.
Even though this is an interesting story,
I'm not going to disagree with your conclusion, but it's interesting that in your entire list, there's absolutely nothing there that's convincing in any real way.
"1. Vista runs extremely well on any modern PC. You may need a video card to get a composite desktop, but I bet people who don't know enough to get a real video card won't care anyway."
Well, that depends on how you define 'modern', doesn't it? I mean, most people would consider PCs bought within the last couple of years 'modern', yet a recent (Infoweek?) survey showed that something like 60-80% of business computers would have to be upgraded or replaced to run Vista. I'm not even CONSIDERING eye-candy like the composite desktop - I'm talking the OS+services running typical tasks. And this also doesn't consider the whole realm of business and home software that would require upgrades to run on Vista due to its abandonment of Win95/98 routine support.
"2. Vista may not be revolutionary, but it's a clear improvement over XP. It's better looking, more polished and overall a much nicer experience."
Really, how? I haven't met a person yet that can tell me of a single thing it does that XP doesn't already do - that is, aside from implement an overwhelmingly restrictive DRM regime.
"3. Almost nobody is going to "buy" Vista. Very few people "bought" XP either. It just makes more sense to get it preloaded."
I get it, because MS's restrictive licenses to OEMs mean that users don't get the choice....ergo it's better? Huh?
"4. The drivers and other compatibility issues will be ironed out quickly."
R-i-g-h-t. Because XP doesn't have any patches anymore. All those issues were ironed out quickly, too.
No, the question is: why has it taken so long for the planet to start to warm again to what are the more reasonable mean temperatures it's had for most of its history (if it is indeed doing so)?
T emperature_Variations.png
_ Change.png
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Holocene_
or, if you prefer a larger timescale:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:65_Myr_Climate
Oh wait, that question is so so hurtful. I must be paid by the oil firms or something.
Of course the easy answer is that they don't care as much about safety, which is balderdash. You think Russians don't care as much about their lives as anyone else? Obviously, they do.
No, I think anyone with familiarity with the space programs of both the "west" and the Soviets...er....Russians would say that reliability is one of their strong points - once the technology has been established. For various reasons, the 'western' space agencies are always improving and tinkering, while the Russian space programs seem to find something that works, and stick with that. They might end up with a control panel with a bunch of Dr Strangelove switches and levers like in the 1950s instead of a cool new multifunction display, but those switches WORK and are CHEAP.
So why try to develop the multifunction display in the first place? A lot of not-directly-measurable benefits as far as safety, pilot-task saturation, etc but the switches DO work just as well.
I was an early adopter of the DVD, and I'm pleased with my choice. However, what I saw is that post-cutting-edge DVD players were just as good for an order of magnitude cheaper and that this post-edge phase was no more than a couple of years later.
Most importantly, I saw that no-name makers made decent quality DVD players for ultra-cheap, and that they recognized the commercial value of user-friendliness. I'm specifically talking about Apex, who makes players with fantastically-easy-to-break region coding. For that reason, and once I heard from a couple of reputable friends that their quality was good, I've been recommending them all over the place.
Now I'll wait for Apex to make HD players because:
- they'll be inexpensive
- the HD format thing will be resolved by then, presumeably
- they'll probably have some sort of hardware that's either implemented or implementable that defeats HD DRM systems as currently designed.
For that, I'm willing to wait a couple of years for marginally better picture quality.
I think the point is to provide a fair pre-purchase metric that people can believe. I know my Volkswagen was advertised as having probably 10-20% better mileage than I get in routine driving. I applaud the EPA for making these numbers mean something in the real-world.
Most importantly, "For the first time, the EPA also will require estimated mileage to be posted on medium-duty pickup trucks, vans and sport utility vehicles -- behemoths such as the Ford Excursion that weigh between 8,500 and 10,000 pounds." is going to be huge. Take that, Detroit, you geriatric has-been. That's a place in desperate need of Darwin.
I've never read "Getting things done" but I can confirm that this system is truly anxiety reducing.
I found out as soon as I started using a palm pilot consistently (and it has to become a habit) that my stress levels decreased tremendously. I think this is the 'addiction' of some of these sorts of devices (including non-devices, like the Franklin Planner system) - to know that you've put it in there, dated it, and WILL get to it is a huge relief.
Of course, then one must be a bit of a slave to oneself: when the item comes up, it has to be dealt with immediately.
Let's remember:
1) what was always scheduled to be a 'couple of hours' very often (perhaps 2/3 of the time) turned into 8-10 hours immediately or shortly after the new patch was applied, servers were up, and then they had to fix something that was newly broken.
2) Most users pay $12-$15/month for 24/7 access. Take down the servers 4 times a month for 4 hours each = 16 hours. That means I'm losing 2% of my available play time. If I'm in Oceania, I'm losing that time during my prime time hours. NOTE: Blizz has been pretty good about compensating people with time credits when the downtime is ridiculous, like DAYS.
Not that it's a big deal (I personally have PLENTY of things that need doing elsewise) but it's not utterly insignificant, either.
I think you're missing the point. Yes, this is an ALPHA model of the device, as the website clearly states.
The key technologies here are
a) the printers are capable of processing subsequent jobs while still producing a current job
b) all machine settings flow from a data file associated with a particular book format
c) your raw inputs are paper, ink/toner, and cover stock (and data). That's it.
How much is one of those IBIS machines? You'd need at least the SB3-4 to do the job, and in that case you have to feed it with
- printed covers
- printed pages of the right format
- changed settings for every book.
Yes, there is too much paper handling, twisting, turning, flipping, etc. Clearly an alpha model that's a proof-of-concept more than a saleable unit. I don't see how they would avoid the milling process, unless they stock (for example) 2 papersources in the machine; otherwise, if they only use a single size sheet (of less than A4) how would they cope with full page illustrations? I guess optimal would be 3 paper sizes - medium quarto, medium octavo, and some average 'paperback' size. But you're probably still going to have a lot of milling, waste, noise, and dust.
Obviously they'd like to see preorders roll in (or even interest) from potential customers before going further. I'm guessing this development has already cost them quite a bit and they're not sure if there's a market.
I think that the main limitation of this is that the books it produces are going to be throwaways - about the quality of a cheap mass-market paperback. Might be good for one full reading or less, before the pages start falling out. The IBIS machines, on the other hand, clearly make superior stitched books, with multiple signatures bound to form the book.
That's probably their market-question: will people pay a reasonable, profit making price for a public-domain book that's of inferior construction, when you can get quite nice volumes of just about everything from companies like Penguin already?
I think the only difference between the results they are getting for in-game ads and the results they get for real-life ads is the fact that in game, since we're dealing with a digital avatar the results can be actually MEASURED.
I think most people generally tune out most ads. Their impact is actually zero. It's occasionally possible that IF I'm thinking of buying something and IF the ad is catchy and IF I happen to notice a particularly clever presentation or jingle, it may briefly impinge on my consciousness.
But if someone at a company measured the amount of additional PROFIT gained from the airing of a single multi-million dollar 30 second spot during the superbowl, or even for a multi-hundreds-of-thousands ad campaign in say Time or Newsweek - I seriously doubt that the costs of advertising are justifiable. Do sales perhaps uptick when an ad is on? Sure. But are there really people out there who see a Budweiser beer ad who then decide to go buy a Budweiser because of that ad (importantly: who weren't going to buy a Bud ANYWAY)?? Enough to justify (in terms of actual profit, not sales) the cost of producing and publishing the ad? I sincerely doubt it.
But eliminate the sham value of advertising and a whole host of revenue structures crumble. Professional sports, for example. Hollywood would tremble as well: Volkswagen is planning to spend $200 million in the next 3-5 yrs to place its cars in Universal movies and in TV shows and ads on NBC, Bravo, Sci Fi and USA. According to Yahoo answers, GM makes nothing on a $20k car. So let's assume that Volkswagen is making at least $6k per car. Are those product placement ads going to sell 33,000 MORE cars than they would have sold without the ads? Seriously?
So now, with in-game ads able to measure very nearly perfectly the presentation, eyeball time, attention-grabbability of every nuance of their performance, advertisers are finding it might not be worth it? What a shock.
Of course, there's no accurate way to determine this in real life - something the ad industry is delighted about.
link to single page print-ready version, so you don't have to click through page after page of minimal text and maximal ads.
e nt_section=Features&fs_article_id=2069
http://www.firingsquad.com/print_article.asp?curr
"public radio only gets a small portion of its funding from tax payer money"
A not-insignificant part of their 'spendable money' comes from the fact that they are not taxed.
Granted, they may not get as much (anymore) directly from the feeding trough of Congress in the form of handouts, but when all of their competition is taxed at the corporate rate of approximately 40% this is a tremendous fiscal advantage and is, in fact, a subsidy - in essence a double whammy since they get all this extra money to spend, and the government has to raise everyone ELSE's taxes a teeny bit to make up for this lost revenue. Corporate Welfare is welfare, no matter how it's handed out.
There are a few different things at work here.
1) the distance between stereo receptors is significant in an inverse relationship to the sensitivity of an individual receptor. Our eyes can only use parallax to determine depth perception because of the (relative) imprecision of our visual field. If our brain could resolve fine details in the visual field better, that 3" between the eyes would be enough distance to resolve parallax out to 50 yards, for example.
2) further, the comparison eyes/nostrils isn't quite accurate. Eyes can tell direction, while the sense of smell of a single nostril is (AFAIK) purely scalar. If two sensors are scalar, then it's possible that having them closely together would help to detect fainter stimuli, at a cost of some ability to resolve direction. Since the nose (and I'm thinking about a tracking dog here) can be relatively easily waved about to define the strength(s) of a smell-field, maybe the advantages in detection capability are worth the tradeoff, or were at one time.
"Even if you don't do the infringing act yourself, if you more or less condone someone else doing it, that's an infringing act."
If you CONDONE someone else doing it, you're an accomplice. You don't even have to explicitly condone it, just "more or less".
No, no dangerous precedent there at all.
I entirely disagree.
s .jpg) To build at these points is MORE energy because you don't have the (minimal) gravity assist of the moon "downhill" leg.
First, long term habitats (I'm not even going to discuss the stupidly-low-orbit ISS) have to be at a Lagrangian point. L5 is typically mentioned. (nice map at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lagrange_point
Further, both have to be built of SOMETHING. Either you lift it out of earth's gravity well and built it at an L-point (or lift it from the moon). Or you can plant a minimal structure on the moon and either use lunar materials (for free) or burrow into the surface. For a space station, every cubic cm of anything has to be lifted from somewhere. For a lunar base, if you need to expand (we all hope) you just dig further or use more moonstuff.
Arguably, a lunar base is safer for the inhabitants. The best protection against cosmic rays and meteorites (barring an atmosphere) is mass. Lots of feet of lunar dirt over ones' head is a hella better protective barrier than some inches of aluminium or kevlar-fabric. The only negative here is that the moon's gravity WOULD attract more micrometeors than a free-floating structure with insignificant (on the scale of planets) mass. Yes, a station is gravitationally neutral so it's conceivable that a 'lifeboat' pod could essentially coast from L5 or L4 to earth entirely unpowered. That's a reasonably heartening idea for anyone wanting a final "all systems have failed, how do we get home" fallback. A lunar base's 'send me home pronto' system would be much more complex with more points of failure. But the "unpowered" route to earth is only reassuring until you start to figure out what happens when you arrive at earth. Screaming into a deep gravity well in an unpowered system is asymtotically identical to 'certain death' anyway.
For humans specifically, a lunar base is probably better as well. 1/6 earth gravity is far easier psychologically and physiologically than weightlessness. We don't, as far as I know, have a good understanding of the long-term effects of the coriolis effects of a spinning station on human equilibrium. Basic human assumptions about how things work around us (convection, etc.) would operate at least somewhat normally on the moon, if somewhat slower.
No, I see no cost savings at all for a station, and when you weigh all the other factors a station makes little sense compared to a base.
Personally, I see the base as a precoursor to the station, where you'd build your interplanetary craft. But that's just me.
Oh, and I almost forgot: you know, you'd think Forbes would be a little higher on the journalism scale than Maxim, no?
No.
The crowning glory was the "video" from Forbes Video Network about gamer hotties (ie girl gamers).
INTRO: "I've interviewed a lot of gamers for FVN, but none like these....they're girls, and they're HOT!"
Sigh. Mind-numbingly shallow.
They weren't even hot.
....like that "600 megabytes of Games!" CD you bought for $5 from the bargain bin, and found out it wasn't worth THAT.
I skimmed through at least a dozen of the 'articles' to find several of them were streaming video links, a couple were little more than links to other pages, and the ones that were actually written were either meaninglessly fluffy "I'm a WoW addict, and I play a lot! In fact, it's caused me to question my priorities!" (gee, THAT's news) or sophomoric rationalizations "Everyone cheats at video games, it's not a bad thing".
Each with it's page with what, at least FIFTY adlogos or paid links?
Go away, Forbes. I want my 6 minutes back. And the revenue you made from my clicks.
No, what I'm pointing out is that the UCS tries to paint itself as simply that, a "union" of "concerned" scientists, when in fact they've had a Liberal Agenda since their very founding (in opposition to Ronald Reagan, and his Star Wars SDI proposals).
For them now, nearly 30 years later, to still be claiming any sort of objectivity is laughable. That's like saying WAMM (a group founded around the same time, with much of the same agenda) is objective - ludicrous from the start.
No, but then again they at least have the intellectual integrity to say that they are CONSERVATIVE .... unlike a certain disingenuous Union which doesn't identify itself as a Left Wing activist organisation.
What's nice is that the Union of Concerned Scientists is so credible, because they've never taken sides in any political debate.
Always been objective, that's what I like about them scientists.
Somehow, however, UCS received an "Ideological Spectrum Rating" of "1" (Radical Left) from the Capital Research Center. Just unlucky, I guess.
Personally, I don't think so. Look at the success of Icewind Dale or Baldur's Gate for how well done and engrossing a 2d game can be.
HOWEVER...I think that you have to separate the tech from the game.
The constant drive to improve render speeds, add polygons, always pushing for ever-faster, ever more expensive hardware? That's little more than phallus-comparison-by proxy, since current 3d games are plenty realistic enough to convey just about any experience visually. Would games get MORE realistic with dynamic shadows, glare, and higher poly counts? Sure. But do they NEED to? Probably not.
It should be noted though, that with the new tools coming out making it ever easier to work in 3d, it's in many cases EASIER to build a world for acting in 3d than 2d - we're monkeys, after all, we THINK in 3d. So to take a game like Planescape, for example, I believe it was rather convoluted to make sure that the character could path to each NPC, reach every clickable on-screen item, etc, etc. "Ah, the character can't walk back there, because then we can't see him."
In a 3d world, that's intuitive and there are (optimally) no 'blind spots'.
"Well, as scientists scan the skies for the easiest piece of mass to colonize, things that resemble Earth's geology & atmosphere are going to require the least effort & resources."
That's a rather meaningless (or outright WRONG) statement.
Mars: tectonically dead or nearly so. Dust storms but no real analogue to Earthly seas, precipitation, or geological processes. Ability to colonize? Relatively easy.
Titan: mountains, clouds, precipitation, "seas", etc. Ability to colonize? Extremely difficult.
Similarity to Earthly processes is meaningless. There are plenty of Earthly processes that make things HARDER, not easier.